TL;DR - I made the Promote MDN WordPress plugin and enjoyed it; why isn't(?) there a more intentional relationship between Mozilla & WordPress communities?
WordPress development
To make the Promote MDN WordPress plugin these last couple weeks, I've worked with WordPress more than I have in the previous decade. I've run dozens of sites with WordPress, but have never been active as a developer or contributor. Observations:
- Keep code tidy - Okay, so there's globals and no MVC. But I copied messy code from SEO Smart Links, ran it thru PHP_CodeSniffer and it was actually easy to follow and work with it, due to the ...
- Good docs - The codex has lots of good info. I Googled for stuff like "wordpress http get", "wordpress cache", and "wordpress i18n" and the codex docs always had what I needed.
- Can leverage Verbatim for l10n - After I made a .pot file for the plugin, I added it to our existing MDN project on verbatim. Within hours it was translated into Dutch, Polish, and German. Then a couple days later Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish too. I love our localization teams so much.
- Releasing is painful - It's exactly this painful. It makes me really love and appreciate our new chief deployment system on MDN, and heroku for my other sites.
- Releasing is cool - It's cool that the plugin is now just a couple clicks away from millions of users. The appeal of "app stores" I guess.
WordPress development at Mozilla
I coordinated a "WordPress at Mozilla" talk for an OKC WordPress User's Group meetup. When I asked about WordPress on Yammer, only Craig and Jake claimed to have WordPress dev and deployment experience at and for Mozilla. They say we have many dozen - approaching a hundred? - WordPress blogs & sites at Mozilla. In addition to that, we have:
- Mozilla Persona Plugin - Persona for your WordPress site.
- Open Attribute Plugin - Add licensing information using OpenAttribute from Mozilla Drumbeat
- WPBadger - Issue badges and add them to a user's Open Badges backpack.
- Promote MDN Plugin - adds links to MDN to your WordPress site content
Mozilla and WordPress
WordPress runs about 55 million websites in the world. 332 million people view over 2.5 billion pages on WordPress.com's hosted sites alone, where there are also 500k new posts and 400k new comments every day.
Which makes me wonder - does Mozilla have any official or intentional relationship with WordPress? Should we?
WordPress empowers people to make and control their own content on the web. (As opposed to, say, Facebook Pages) It seems like we could combine efforts in some cool ways. At the very least, many of our projects and websites could probably put together a cool and useful WordPress plugin of some kind. It's really not bad at all. :)
